Two good statistical references

Summer is over and most of you are beginning work again. Now if you like me are in school and happen to do something about economics and business this post might be a good one for you to bookmark for later reference and term papers. First off is a hat tip to New Economist who reports on the recent 'Doing Business' report from the World Bank (1.8 MB PDF overview ! - see also this aggregate site). New Economist sums up ...

'The dominance of the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries continues (see my post on last year's report). Other economies in the top ten for ease of doing business were: (4) Canada, (5) Hong Kong, (6) the United Kingdom, (7) Denmark, (8) Australia, (9) Norway, (10) Ireland.'

The second one is from The European Central Bank in the form of the institution's Statistics Pocket Book (PDF). Needless to say that this one isn't very colourful, but it is littered with 'nice to know' economic facts and indicators of the Eurozone. In short, a good tool to have in the toolkit for the analyses to come.